Ebony Utley: Slouching Toward Washington - Book Review - Truthdig

Posted on Apr 12, 2012

By Ebony Utley

“Branding Obamessiah: The Rise of an American Idol”
A book by Mark Edward Taylor

Mark Edward Taylor, in “Branding Obamessiah: The Rise of an American Idol,” carefully reconstructs how six sacred branding strategies turned a mere mortal into an American savior. Taylor clearly believes that Barack Obama was too politically inexperienced to become president of the United States. Our current president was, however, very skilled at branding. Obama’s strategies were composing a creation story, chanting sacred words, venerating sacred images, observing sacred rituals, bringing in believers and coloring the messiah.

Although the sacred six are an unoriginal appropriation from the world of advertising, Taylor neatly grafts them onto the 2008 presidential campaign by beginning with Obama’s creation story of racial angst during his childhood in Hawaii. Taylor goes to great pains to argue that Obama’s memories within “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” were manipulated to create a racial consciousness that Obama most likely did not experience and furthermore did not even write. He critiques the text for having “so little real evidence of abject, institutional racism,” and suggests that “Obama understood the power of race to open doors, and so he created a story that would make his skin’s color more vivid.”

As evenhanded as Taylor is throughout the book, his dismissal of Obama is rarely as stark as when he claims being a black boy in Hawaii couldn’t have been that bad. Irrespective of who crafted Obama’s memoir and why, Taylor is wrong to dismiss Obama’s account of racial trauma. An outsider has no right to estimate the psychological impact of racism, especially if the outsider has never lived as a person of color.

In the same way that race is a key word in “Dreams from My Father,” hope and change were the sacred words of Obama’s campaign. Whether used individually or combined as hope for change, Obama’s words addressed Americans’ desperate need for anything other than the George W. Bush legacy. So desperate were his constituents that no one ever queried the actual meaning of the terms. Taylor points out that “ ‘change’ doesn’t indicate direction, ‘hope’ isn’t a strategy and ‘believe’ doesn’t refer to an object beyond itself.” Taylor historicizes the consistency of “change” as a presidential campaign motif, but explains how Obama embodied change as a young, handsome, part-black political novice who starkly contrasted his opponents’ stagnant “experience.” He continues:

A troubled and anxious people are susceptible to promises of an easy fix. Obama was careful to utter just enough for many Americans to hear what they wanted to hear in his sacred words—words that motivated but did not explain. Words that moved voters to act but not to reflect. Words that triggered emotion but not critical understanding. People translated Obama’s words into their own image and in turn projected that image onto him. And by creating images of a utopian future that went far beyond dull, policy-driven reality, they unwittingly became a band of prophets proclaiming the coming of a messiah who was promising everything—and promising nothing.

Ebony Utley: Slouching Toward Washington - Book Review - Truthdig